Web services have become more popular as more people access the Internet. The ability of a company to monitor the performance of its web service is important to provide an uninterrupted web-based service and a satisfactory experience for web service customers. One way a web service can be monitored is by viewing performance data of the components comprising the service. In particular, a web service administrator may analyze a set of application data associated with web service components. After analyzing the application data, the administrator may determine how the service is performing, trouble shoot web service issues, and perform other tasks.
Some systems allow administrators or users to analyze data by viewing a subset of the data. In order to view a desired subset of a group of data, some systems allow a user to specify filter terms to a filtering mechanism. The filtering mechanism filters the group of data using the terms and provides the resulting data to the user.
Some filtering mechanisms utilize natural language processing to specify terms. These mechanisms are useful because natural language grammar can be used to express the desired result. A user may type a sentence into an interface. The filter then parses the sentence to identify components of the sentence and retrieves the data specified by identified components. However, processing of the natural language is complicated. Typical computers do not have the resources to process natural language queries that are subject to dialect, misunderstanding and other factors that may change from person to person.
Another previous filtering mechanism is natural language output. In natural language output, a user may choose a selection from a fixed array of terms for a number of pre-selected fields. Each array is associated with a bounded list of choices. A user may select a choice from an array using a drop down menu. The natural language output mechanism then retrieves a set of data corresponding to the user choices.
Previous natural language filtering mechanisms are limited. For instance, previous mechanisms do not have a feature for adding or removing optional clauses. Rather, a user is restricted to working with the fields provided. Additionally, field selections are bounded to data known by the application.